Recipes, guides and kitchen know-how. Mostly useful, occasionally silly.
Forty Cloves of Garlic, One Chicken, Zero Vampires
Eight chicken thighs slow-cooked in one pot with forty unpeeled cloves, thyme, lemon and stock. The garlic turns soft and sweet enough to spread on toast. No wine, no cream, no peeling.
Made it? Rate it
- Prep15 min
- Cook1 hr 45
- Serves4
Forty cloves of garlic.
Not four. Not fourteen. Forty.
The first time I read that I assumed it was a typo, or a dare, or a recipe written by someone who'd fallen out with their partner.
It's none of those. It's French.
And here's the twist nobody tells you: it isn't that garlicky.
Cooked slowly in their skins, the cloves go soft, sweet and spreadable, like garlic that's been on a long holiday and come back relaxed.
You squeeze them out of their jackets onto crusty bread. It tastes like butter that went to university.
So this is my chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. One pot, eight thighs, no wine, no cream, and no peeling.
That last bit is the one that sold me.
Where did 40 cloves come from?
It's a Provençal dish - poulet aux quarante gousses d'ail, if you want to say it while waving your hands.
The American food writer James Beard fell for Provençal cooking while stationed in France in the Second World War, published his version in 1974, and spent years making a nation count garlic.
He was fussy about it. All forty. No rounding down.
The old-school version seals the lid shut and doesn't open it for an hour and a half. Like a time capsule, but you can eat it.
I read a stack of versions from serious cooks and kept the bits that work in an ordinary British kitchen on an ordinary Sunday.
What you need
For the pot
- 8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs. Not breasts. Thighs stay juicy through a long cook. Breasts sulk.
- 40 garlic cloves, about 3 to 4 bulbs. Separated, left unpeeled, just rub off the loose papery bits.
- 1 tbsp olive oil and 20g butter
- 1½ tsp sea salt flakes and plenty of black pepper
- 8 sprigs of fresh thyme and 1 bay leaf
- 1 lemon, halved
- 250ml chicken stock
- 1 tbsp white wine vinegar. The classic uses wine. The vinegar does the same job - a bit of sharpness - with none of the wine.
To serve
- A crusty baguette or sourdough, sliced and toasted
- 1 tbsp plain flour, if you like a thicker sauce
- Green salad, greens or mash. Something has to be the responsible adult.
Kit
- A wide, shallow, ovenproof casserole with a lid, big enough to hold all eight thighs in one layer
- Foil
- Tongs
- A probe thermometer, if you've got one
How to make it
1. Brown the chicken
- Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan, gas 4).
- Pat the thighs dry with kitchen paper and season all over with the salt and pepper.
- Heat the oil and butter in the casserole over a medium-high heat.
- Brown the thighs skin side down for about 5 minutes, in two batches, until the skin is deep golden. Lift them out onto a plate.
Don't crowd the pan. Eight thighs at once will steam, not brown.
Pale chicken skin is the culinary equivalent of socks with sandals.
If the fat starts smoking hard, turn the heat down a touch.
2. Build the pot
- Take the pan off the heat. Tip out all but a spoonful of fat.
- Pour in the stock and vinegar and scrape up the brown bits from the bottom. That's flavour. Free flavour.
- Scatter half the garlic over the base of the pan with the thyme and bay.
- Sit the chicken on top, skin side up, in a single layer, along with any juices from the plate.
- Tuck the rest of the garlic and the lemon halves into the gaps.
The stock should come part way up the chicken, not over the skin. Wet skin never goes crisp again.
It's a bit like me after a swim.
3. Seal it and leave it alone
- Cover the pan with a sheet of foil, then press the lid on top. The foil makes a tighter seal, so nothing escapes.
- Into the oven for 1 hour. Do not peek. James Beard is watching.
- Take off the lid and foil and give it another 30 minutes uncovered, so the skin crisps up.
Leave the garlic in its skins. The papery jacket protects each clove, so it steams gently in its own little tent and turns sweet and soft instead of brown and bitter. It also means you don't have to peel forty cloves. Nobody has the time. Nobody has the fingernails.
4. Check it's done
- Push a skewer or knife into the thickest part of a thigh, near the bone. The juices should run clear, with no pink meat, and it should be steaming hot all the way through.
- With a probe, aim for 75C for 30 seconds in the thickest part, keeping the tip off the bone.
That's straight from the Food Standards Agency's guide to cooking food properly.
If you've never used a probe before, here's where to put it so it doesn't lie to you.
Thighs are forgiving. Food poisoning is not.
5. Make the sauce and serve
- Lift the chicken onto a warm plate and cover loosely with foil.
- Fish out the lemon, thyme stalks and bay. Squeeze the lemon juice back into the pan.
- Pick out about half the garlic, squeeze the soft cloves out of their skins and mash them into the pan juices. Every mouthful gets some garlic now, not just the lucky ones.
- For a thicker sauce, whisk in the flour and bubble for a couple of minutes on the hob.
- Serve the chicken with the sauce spooned over, the whole cloves on the side, and the toast for spreading.
Then everybody squeezes their own garlic onto their own bread.
It's messy, sticky and slightly competitive. Like most of the best family dinners.
The garlic press trick
Squeezing twenty cloves out of their skins one at a time gets old quickly, and it gets everywhere.
So drop the soft, cooked cloves skins and all into a garlic press and squeeze. The roasted garlic comes out the holes. The skins stay behind.
Straight into the sauce, job done, fingers clean.
We use our own garlic press for it. It's the one we designed to be easy to squeeze and easy to clean, which matters when it's full of hot garlic. I'm biased. I'm also not wrong.
If it goes wrong
Garlic tastes bitter? Old garlic with green shoots in the middle, or the cloves were peeled and browned too hard.
Fix: use firm, fresh bulbs, keep the skins on, and keep the lid on for the first hour.
Flabby, pale skin? It sat under the stock, or never got its uncovered half hour.
Fix: skin side up, stock below the skin, lid off for the last 30 minutes.
Garlic still hard? The pan wasn't sealed and the moisture escaped.
Fix: foil under the lid, pressed down round the edges. Put any firm cloves back in the oven for 10 more minutes while you make the sauce.
Need it done before guests turn up? Panic is not an ingredient.
Fix: brown and assemble it the day before and keep it covered in the fridge. Warm it on the hob for 5 minutes, then into the oven as normal.
Any whole cloves left over are a gift. Keep them in a sealed tub in the fridge for a few days and spread them on toast. Or eat them standing at the fridge. I don't make the rules.
It's the least scary 40 clove garlic chicken you'll ever make, and the best excuse for crusty bread I know.
Now go and squeeze something.
